Overweight people should pay 'fat tax' to cover healthcare costs, German MP says

Overweight people should pay higher taxes in order to cover the extra costs they create for German's healthcare system, a conservative MP has said.

Treatment in Germany for obesity-related illnesses is esitmated at £16 billion a year

By Allan Hall in Berlin

5:06PM BST 22 Jul 2010

"The question must be admitted whether the immense costs that, for example, arise from excessive consumption of food, can be permanently paid out of the consolidated health system," said Marco Wanderwitz, the conservative MP for the state of Saxony.

"I think it's sensible that people who knowingly live unhealthily carry a responsibility for it in a financial respect," said Mr Wanderwitz, who is also head of Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats's group of young parliamentarians

He was supported by Juergen Wasem, an economist who said foods like chocolate should carry health warnings.

"As with tobacco, we should tax the purchase of unhealthy consumer goods at a higher rate and pay that tax into the health system," he said.

Germany's health system is funded by a series of mandatory health insurance funds, all of which are reporting serious deficits as the system is overused.

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Bild, the German newspaper, estimated that treatment for obesity-related illnesses cost Germany some £16 billion a year.

Recently the German Teachers' Association recommended weighing children in class each day and reporting the seriously overweight to social services, who would have the power to remove them to clinics.

Although opposition politicians blasted the "fat-tax" proposal, researchers at the Jacobs University in Bremen claimed its work proved that the majority of the public would back a tax on people whose unhealthy lifestyles landed them in hospital or under other medical care.